League of Alternative Soccer Reality
The League of Alternative Soccer Reality, popularly known by its acronym LASR (pronounced "laser"), is a fictional soccer league based on the real-life English Football League. It is a results-based league that uses modern re-creations of the 1970s-era dice game Logacta to resolve the results of matches. Although seasons are only numbered, not given years, the league's first season roughly corresponds with the early 1960s. Due to the limitations of Logacta, only team records and results are kept, no individual statistics are tracked. LASR started out with two divisions of 16 teams each, using real-life professional football teams from England and Wales. The initial teams were selected based on the street layout of a housing subdivision in Baldivis, Western Australia, where the streets are named after English football stadiums. Overview The LASR began play on Sunday, 18 June 2018. It moved quickly, as league founder TranmereYank had only discovered Logacta two days prior. The league structure was developed on Saturday with the first matches commencing the next day. In deciding on teams to populate the league initially, TranmereYank looked to a nearby housing development, Highbury Park, where the developer drew inspiration from English football grounds past and present to come up with street names. After consulting Google Maps, TranmereYank complied a list of the streets and selected 16 of them to comprise the First Division. Unused clubs were slotted into the Second Division, (with the exception of Bradford City, Brentford and Colchester United) as well as large English clubs whose stadium names were not used as streets in Highbury Park but who TranmereYank wanted to be involved in the game. Originally, the LASR consisted of 32 teams in two 16-team divisions. There was promotion and relegation between the divisions, as the bottom two teams in the First Division were automatically relegated and the top two teams in the Second Division were automatically promoted. Initially, no provision was made for teams outside of the two divisions to join the LASR, nor was their any way for teams to be relegated out of the league. League History Season 1: The Beginnings Season 1 of the LASR began with two 16-team divisions, named the First and Second Divisions. Only the first division was played out according to the Logacta procedures; as a time-saving measure, all Second Division results were simulated at once before the First Division season began. As a consequence, the identities of the two teams that would be promoted to the First Division in Season 2 were known prior to the commencement of Season 1. Teams * Indicates a team selected for the league on the basis of having a street in the Highbury Park subdivision named after its home ground. In addition, three clubs (Bradford City, Brentford and Colchester United) also have streets in honour of their home grounds (Valley Parade, Griffin Park and Layer Road, respectively) but were deemed "too small" to join the LASR initially. These teams were placed in the Football Alliance and granted permanent places in the LASR version of the FA Cup and the Super Cup.